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Holy crap!!
I am becoming to think that nvidia GPUs, are somewhat easier to command(program) than Radeons are. I have no other explanation for this performance boost without any nvidia support, or documentation. Maybe some one of the Radeon developers will clear the situation.

Actually they are!

AMDs architecture takes packets of 5 ( or 4 on Cayman) Commands per Streaming Processor.
The Nvidia equivalent takes only one command.

So the AMD driver needs to find 5 (4) Commands to be packaged together.
The Nvidia driver just needs to give them fire.

I may be missing something, but is this all about the open source driver scoring 20.52fps versus nvidia binary scoring "only" 19.95fps? In one test?

yes you are, that "the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver now meets or exceeds the speed of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver in a number of OpenGL test cases..." means it was not as fast as the nvidia binary scoring before, not that it now beats it at a few .% now...

they may even optimise today's code some more by Monday given encouragement from this article OC, but i dont suppose he will pull a new git and run tests by then if they do

The nouveau driver would definitely be ideal for those cards that aren't supported by the blob any longer, such as the GeForce 5 and older. The GeForce 6 and 7 series can also benefit too. At some point it'll be possible to support the newest cards once the devs figure out how to turn on the antialiasing modes and to make use of the stream processors. I have to admit that the Nouveau driver has made great strides despite not having any support or documentation from nVidia.

The nouveau driver would definitely be ideal for those cards that aren't supported by the blob any longer, such as the GeForce 5 and older. The GeForce 6 and 7 series can also benefit too. At some point it'll be possible to support the newest cards once the devs figure out how to turn on the antialiasing modes and to make use of the stream processors. I have to admit that the Nouveau driver has made great strides despite not having any support or documentation from nVidia.

i agree. even if the open source developers never manage to keep up with the current drivers, at least they will always have faster, up-to-date drivers for the older cards where nvidia won't, which to me is great.
i personally don't really care about using open source drivers vs proprietary (with the except that OS drivers can be used in package managers), i just care about what works best.

While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel has been out for less than one week, if you use NVIDIA graphics, particularly with a low-end GPU, start counting down the days to the release of the Linux 2.6.39 kernel. Particularly on lower-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver now meets or exceeds the speed of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver in a number of OpenGL test cases...

Anything that is +/- 1% is probably in the margin of error and can be regarded as being the same. The fact that you can get a 0.04% improvement in your benchmark runs does not mean that it is necessarily faster.

If this test was CPU bound, all results including 9800GT would be pretty much the same. If the 9800GT managed to get ahead, it's because the CPU wasn't a bottleneck for any card that underperformed it.

It could still be CPU bound. For instance CPU might be able to cope up to 50fps with the gallium stack so any GPU that can't reach such framerate won't experience the CPU boundary but any GPU that can go way faster than this limit will be CPU bound.

So no, CPU bound -> all GPU same frame rate, this is only true if CPU bound is smaller than the slowest GPU speed.

On the radeon/nvidia side, nouveau people are in the lucky position of having not freeze their API which means they can change the way the communicate with the kernel. It's not the case for radeon and if i was to write it again today i would do it completely differently. Doesn't means this is the only explanation, just an explanation on why nouveau is capable of doing major kernel change that give major improvement.